


Googled

by canadiankazz



Category: Vampire: The Masquerade, Vampire: The Masquerade - L.A. By Night (Web Series)
Genre: Gen, Nosferatu (Vampire: The Masquerade), Vampires, non-canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-15
Updated: 2019-01-15
Packaged: 2019-10-10 21:57:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17434241
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/canadiankazz/pseuds/canadiankazz
Summary: Annabelle is curious about what Jasper used to look like before his Embrace. It contains a mild spoiler for episodes 7 and 8 of Season 1. Written before the premiere of Season 2.





	Googled

Jasper is used to people staring at him. Whenever he is visible, and in mixed Kindred company, there is someone staring at him. He knew that some Nosferatu got offended by that, but he didn’t, not any more. Annabelle stared at him the first time she saw him without his hood on, in the back seat of Victor Temple’s SUV. She had apologised when he challenged her on it, but he had only smiled and assured her it wasn’t as rude as she thought it was.

She was staring at him again now, with a little tilt to her head. It reminded him of a dog that had heard a sound it didn’t recognise. He looked at her, met her gaze. “Something on your mind?” he asked.

She blinked. She was still in the habit of blinking on the regular. “Sorry, I was just wondering… can I ask you something, Jasper? Something kind of personal?”

He shrugged. “Sure, but I might not answer it.” Though many of his secrets had been recently exposed to the coterie, he kept the rest of his cards as close to his chest as he could.

“What did you used to look like before…?” She waved a hand over her face, struggling to phrase the question in such a way that it wouldn’t be offensive.

“Before I was turned?”

Annabelle’s hand dropped back to her lap. Her brow furrowed in the way it always did when he was concerned about him. “Yeah.”

Jasper was quiet for a moment or two. It was long enough to make Annabelle think asking him this was a mistake. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have-”

“No, no, it’s okay,” he cut her off. “I’m just trying to remember.”

Him saying that broke her heart a little. “Do you… are there any photos of you from before?”

“Yeah, of course, but I don’t have any of them. There would be high school year books… family photos.” He shrugged again.

Annabelle reached a hand to his arm to comfort him, but hesitated. He didn’t seem as upset about this as she was. Even still, although she knew he had a mortal out there whom he had cared about, and who presumably had cared about him, another fact hit home with her. Jasper had been someone’s son, possibly someone’s nephew, cousin, brother or grandson. He had gone to school as a child and a teenager, but now…

She stayed quiet while Jasper thought. He ran his tongue over his lips and fangs before speaking again.

“I had black hair. I usually kept it short,” he said at last.

Annabelle nodded. It was hard to tell what his complexion used to be like now that his skin was supernaturally pale and dead, but she thought that could picture him with dark hair. “What about your eyes?”

“Brown.”

She bit her lower lip, trying to quell the rise of emotion. His eyes were the total opposite now – not just blue, but almost white. His pupils didn’t tend to move very often, which was unsettling. She swore sometimes she could see an inhuman reflective layer when a light shone on them in the dark, like the red eyes in the darkness that Ramona sometimes had… or like an animal. She wondered if he had better dark vision than she and the others did, which would make sense given that he seemed used to travelling in the underground tunnels without a light, but now wasn’t the time to ask about that.

“What if we Googled you?” she asked.

Jasper looked at her again, eyebrows raised, then frowned. “What?”

She knew he knew what Google was. “You’ve never thought of…”

He shook his head. “No, I’ve never thought of Googling myself. Why would I do that? Remember,” his tongue went to his fangs again, “my past is as dead as I am, and there’s no going back.”

Annabelle sighed. He was probably right. Maybe digging up photos of him online might be too painful for him.

“But,” Jasper continued. “I know you mean well. And… if you want to Google me, you can. I won’t stop you.”

“Were you from L.A.?”

He shook his head again. “No. From somewhere else in California, yes, but I came here for college.”

Annabelle nodded. A lot of kids did that.

There was a pause. Jasper waited to see if she had any more questions. She did, but didn’t want to pick at old scars any more than she already had.

A thought occurred to Jasper, now that all of this was on his mind again, and he decided to ask her something. “Annabelle, what will you do assuming you out live Mark and Eleanor?”

She blinked again, in surprise. He knew what he meant by ‘assuming.’ She still tended to live her unlife with more risks than the others were comfortable with. “I, um… I hadn’t thought about that.” The thought made her incredibly sad, but she knew the truth of it. “They will age and get old and I…”

“You won’t.”

Annabelle sighed. “I don’t know,” she said softly, sadly. Her hand went to the golden heart that hung around her neck. Jasper had never asked about it, but he assumed that, like her silver ring, it had been a gift from them to her. He knew that a time would come when Chloe would no longer walk this earth as well. He wondered if she still had the thing he had given her.

He forced a smile at Annabelle, fangs gleaming. He put a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t worry too much about it for right now, but do keep that in mind. Best case scenario… and they don’t end up getting killed by some other Kindred, fifty or sixty years from now, they’ll be dead and you’ll hopefully still be around.”

She gave him a tiny smile. “Hopefully. And hopefully we’ll still have each other, right?”

He honestly didn’t know. A lot could change in sixty years. But he didn’t want to see her upset any more this night. He smiled and resisted the impulse to show his fangs again. “Hopefully, yes.”

She nodded, satisfied with that for the time being.

Later that night, not too long before dawn, she did try to Google Jasper. She found a lot of people in California who shared his name, and soon became frustrated with the results. There was a tennis player with his name who obviously wasn’t him, and a few lawyers who looked like they were forty years old at least. She didn’t know how old Jasper was, but he couldn’t be older than thirty, she guessed. Or at least… he was that age when he was embraced. Probably younger.

Just as she was about to leave the website however, her eyes landed on a photo down at the bottom of the page of a young man with short, dark hair. It was as if it had been shaved and grown back. He had very expressive brown eyes, the kind she had to admit to herself she would have been attracted to. His skin was a little pale, but flushed with health and life. The photo was a studio head shot, like so many young hopefuls in Hollywood have. Unless the photographer was very good at replicating natural light, she guessed it had been taken outside during the day. The man’s cheeks were no where near as gaunt as Jasper’s. She could also see a freckle or two on his face that Jasper didn’t have… or maybe he did, but it was just covered with black veins. The man in the photo was wearing a shirt with light grey sleeves, a colour she could never picture Jasper wearing.

She stared at the kind image, the dark eyes, the little determined smile on his face. She remembered Jasper saying that he hadn’t been a good person while he was alive, but that was a little hard to believe upon seeing this head shot. She swallowed. Maybe this wasn’t Jasper at all. There were too many differences. But… he did say that the transformation into a Nosferatu was a dramatic one. Something in her gut, not the Beast, but her heart, hold her that this was probably him. She sighed and decided not to bring this up with him again. It wouldn’t do either of them any good. She closed the web page and went to bed, trying to put that head shot out of her mind.

**Author's Note:**

> The idea for this fic wouldn't leave me alone so I wrote it more or less to get it out of my system. It's since been proven non-canon, because it's since been revealed that if Annabelle really did Google Jasper's name, she would have gotten some VERY different results, but I didn't know that at the time of writing. This was the fic that confirmed for me that I was back on my fandom B.S. because it was the first fic that I had written and published in many years.
> 
> First published to the my tumblr December 2018.


End file.
